Randolph rapper, 19, is rubbing shoulders with big names, and making one for himself
“This is one of those albums,” Randolph native and rap artist Rich Amiri — real name Amiri Chase — says of “Ghetto Fabulous,” his third studio album, which has garnered 30.8 million streams across platforms since its Nov. 17 release.
He’s 19. But you don’t hear it in his music. Amiri hurdles through hard-hitting songs such as “One Call” and “Codeine Crazy” with command. His confidence, strong delivery, and mature voice belie his age.
With millions of streams on Spotify alone, including a collaboration with “Ransom” rapper Lil Tecca on “Poppin,” Amiri, who started releasing music as a high school sophomore in 2020 from his bedroom, is on the up.
Signed to the independent L.A.-based label 10K Projects and its imprint Internet Money Records, Amiri’s part of an impressive cohort — Ice Spice and Trippie Redd are some of the label’s other clients. In XXL magazine’s June print issue, Amiri is featured adjacent to Sexyy Red, 2023’s “SkeeYee” breakout rapper.
His October “B4 #GHETTO FABULOUS” tour with three of four dates opening for rapper DC The Don took Amiri to Dallas, Chicago, and Atlanta after he co-headlined at the First Class Fest music festival in Toronto.
“It was amazing. I feel like it was my first big tour [where] fans are really familiar with me. The ones I went on before — they didn’t really know who I was. But this was amazing,” says Amiri.
The first time he performed, Amiri says, was in Worcester, “in some guy’s shed.” Said shed owner organized local artists to perform for a crowd of roughly 30, “but that felt like 1,000 people. I don’t care, it felt like I was performing in an arena.”
Since then, the rapper’s audiences have quickly scaled up. When he co-headlined at the Toronto festival, Amiri was greeted by a crowd of 800, many of them fans who belted his lyrics.
“It’s a little scary before you hit the stage,” Amiri says, “but I can’t really describe the feeling — with however many hundred people singing your song wordfor-word . . . [it’s] euphoric.”
“Before every show the nerves get worked a little bit,” he says. He’s been onstage three dozen times or so. “[You’d] think after a while I wouldn’t feel that nervousness. But I feel like it never goes away. It’s still always there.”
When he hit send on his breakout song “Relocate,” Amiri was 17, and he says that was the song that gave him the networking clout to connect with the right people. “I would say that’s where things finally started to make sense,” he says.
His management company discovered Amiri at the Middle East in Cambridge in November 2021, at a show featuring local talent. “We built a relationship with [Amiri], became his managers, helped him navigate through the process of signing a record deal, and have been by his side every step of the way over the last two-plus years helping build his career,” says manager Nissim Hershkovits. He and his partner were Emerson College students “trying to find a way into the music industry” at the time they made their introduction.
“My entire life I’ve been freestyling with my friends, [and] writing rap lyrics [in] my notebook. I used to go on the comments [section] of Future and Speaker Knockerz’s songs, and I would write my own version of the song,” says Amiri.
Initially a pluggnb rapper, a genre combining plugg music and R&B, Amiri says he’s moved away from the style. Spotify categorizes his music as “vapor trap” and “rap rage.”
Amiri writes his own songs. His “Ghetto Fabulous” track “AINT NOTHING,” “gotta be the top song I’ve ever made in my life. It’s just fire. The beat’s fire. My delivery’s fire. It’s just a really good song,” he says smiling.
Of artists such as Future, Lil Keed, Young Thug, and Gunna, Amiri says, “I feel like I incorporate a mix of [them] and put my own spin on it.”
Amiri is quickly gaining confidence as his career accelerates. But with his newfound status, he’s also learning some of the pitfalls of fame.
People online have accused him of copying lyrics. To that, Amiri says, “It just don’t be true. Everything is strictly me.”
Amiri says people write negative comments on his Instagram posts and YouTube videos and “never think about it again, and think it’s small and insignificant.” But “when you’re you, and you’re seeing hundreds of people . . . saying something [negative], even [amongst] all the love, it does get hard to ignore, especially when you’re not in the best headspace.”
Amiri added that it can feel like critics “know more about you than you know about yourself.”
“It can get overwhelming, but I just think about it like I wouldn’t want anything else for myself. I gotta count my blessings because there’s so many people that would do anything to be in my position. For me to even think for a second that this is a bad thing feels selfish,” he says.
Amiri has received praise from people he admires, which feels to him like one of the most prominent and personal markers of success. “People that I used to look up to are reaching out to me and being like, ‘Oh wow, this song is amazing. Keep it up,’ ” says Amiri.
Currently in Los Angeles, where he spent time fine-tuning “Ghetto Fabulous,” Amiri’s set his sights on Atlanta.
“That’s really where everything I enjoy comes from. I feel like the people there resonate with me better than people from anywhere else. That’s where trap music started. There’s a scene bubbling there in terms of the next generation of trap artists. It just feels like the right place,” he says.
“Like how New York is the city that never sleeps?” That’s Atlanta, Amiri says.